Every Tagi Pad traces back to a fellowship, a Rotary club in North Carolina, and a $2,500 grant that turned an idea into an enterprise.
Our founder, Lucy, is a public-health practitioner and a Rotarian. In 2022 she was selected for the Mandela Washington Fellowship — the U.S. government’s flagship programme for young African leaders. During her time in the United States she attended Boone Sunrise Rotary Club meetings in North Carolina and shared the work she was doing back home.
A problem she’d seen first-hand
For years, TAG-I had been running SRHR education and donating sanitary towels to girls in rural Uasin Gishu. But in session after session, girls kept asking for reusable pads — even after receiving disposables. The disposables ran out; the need did not. Lucy knew that to make a real, lasting difference, the work had to become sustainable.
The pitch — and the yes
Back in Kenya, she kept pursuing a grant she believed could kick-start a vision of sustainability for TAG-I. She shared the gaps and challenges with the Boone Sunrise Rotary Club and asked for support to start making reusable sanitary towels in her own village, where she had seen the problem up close.
After several pitches, the club said yes. In March 2025, TAG-I received a small grant of $2,500 — and Tagi Social Enterprise was born.
“I’d seen the challenge first-hand. I knew we needed something that lasts.”
What the grant built
The funding bought sewing machines, materials and equipment, and trained six teenage mothers to make reusable pads by hand. After training, the team began producing — and obsessing over quality. One year later, those first stitches would become a KEBS-certified product.